complementary and alternative medicine

This thesis is an effort to solve a specific problem: to resolve the conflict over Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and medical pluralism. There should be no doubt, that although this work fulfils every requirement for a philosophical PhD, there is another objective here as well: to bring philosophical expertise to bear on the shortcomings of medical epistemology which have given rise to the current conflict over medical pluralism -- and to provide EBM public health decision makers with the additional philosophical tools and understanding they desperately need to cope with aggressive CAM advocacy rhetorically, in the interdisciplinary environment of public health policy making. The problems with the adjudications of CAM efficacy by EBM authorities, for example, are in part meta-analytic in nature -- the use of erroneously liberal thresholds for determinations of efficacy, when working exclusively with forms of clinical evidence derived from fundamentally biased studies.